my idle life

I sat in the coffeeshop for hours today. My inner scene is this violent place and I do a lot of battle there even if it looks like I'm only sitting, drinking coffee, staring into space or appearing to read. Sometimes I *am* reading. Sometimes I'm struggling quietly with all these demons, feeling like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton rolled into one and not a little disgusted with myself, and that's the point. Always disgusted with myself. That's the demons winning.

Anyway, I wish I could say all this idleness had a good purpose. Today, I did not: walk to the store for cucumber starts, buy a replacement lightbulb for the one that burnt out last week over the sink, cook SK (who has spent the entire day transcribing last night's class and seeing clients) a nice dinner, wash my dishes or my laundry, clean up the Sunday Times that has been laying in the floor for seven days or check my mail.

SK says "I don't understand how you spend your days." Or something like that. Neither do I.

We watched the film Broken Flowers yesterday. SK says, "I like these little vignettes." I wonder if I could ever make a living from vignettes.

I'm reading a novel/memoir by Hemingway and it's very sweet, the relationship between himself and his wife who is called Miss Mary by everyone including him. He and Miss Mary have a firmly established respect and tenderness for one another -- a palpable trust. She trusts his knowledge and his ability to *do* things, he trusts her knowledge and the consistancy of her compaionship and, at the heart of it, they both seem to really like each other without having to be too claustrophobic about it. I am studying them.

I want to say to SK, "Don't mind this idleness. I may appear to do nothing, but really I am composting my life experiences in my mind into the mulch of my writing." I want to assure her that my apparant idleness is all to a very noble, artful purpose. And, in some part of me, I believe it. After all, I'm not actually idle. I'm reading, writing, thinking, researching -- all the while beating back the demons that say "you are worthless, you will never write anything but unread blogposts, you will never get a job you love, you may as well hop under the wheels of the next bus that thunders by." Just fighting the demons alone is like a full day's work.

I want to say all that to SK, but I'm afraid I'll never produce the results that will show my explanation to be accurate. Nothing but blogposts and coffeebreath at the end of the day. In the fall, school will start back and save me from myself. By the time August comes, I will be thankful for it.